Illustrates hundreds of paintings, drawings, and sculptures from all corners of the world, revealing that angels play an important role not only in Judaism and Christianity but also in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam

Angels

Wilson, Peter Lamborn

Arts & Photography

Pantheon Books

THAMES HUDSON LTD

Here is an astonishing collection of paintings, drawings, and sculpture of angels from every century and from every corner of the world. In this wide-ranging text, Wilson offers a feast for the eye which shows how angels have acted as intermediaries between humans and the divine--in many varied spiritual traditions. 120 illustrations, 16 in color.

Angels: Messengers of the Gods (Art and Imagination)

Themes

Thames&Hudson

Celestial emissaries have inspired artists from every tradition to create artwork and decoration for temples, tapestries, miniatures, and manuscripts. Here is a dazzling array of angels in art, folklore, literature, and scripture, around the world and through the ages. Learned and lucid, the text illuminates the sacred origins of angels—from Jewish, Christian, and Muslim to Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist, and Zoroastrian.

Angels (Art + Imagination)

Religious

Literary Nonfiction. In the late 19th and early 20th century Peter Lamborn Wilson hosted The Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade on WBAI-FM in NYC, where he would read his essays as "Radio Sermonettes." One of these, "Utopian Trails in Central Park," was thought lost until the publisher of Logosophia found some tapes he had made of Wilson's shows. UTOPIAN TRACE contains this essay, with Wilson's on air running commentary (in a green font), extensive updated notes (in maroon font), and dozens of color period and contemporary illustrations. The result is a kudos-proclaiming celebration of New York City's great and glorious Central Park, and those who created it, especially Frederick Law Olmsted, whom Wilson calls "a hero of the people." In elegant, pulsing, yet economically descriptive sentences, Wilson presents and comments upon, a lengthy letter Olmsted wrote in July 1862, describing a visit to the North American Phalanx in New Jersey, an intentional community founded upon the aesthetic communitarian theories of Charles Fourier.

Utopian Trace

Literature & Fiction

Essays & Correspondence

Logosophia, LLC

Peter Lamborn Wilson proposes a set of heresies, a culture of resistance, that dispels the false image of Islam as monolithic, puritan, and two-dimensional. Here is the story of the African-American noble Drew Ali, the founder of Black Islam” in this country, and of the violent end of his struggle for love, truth, peace, freedom, and justice.” Another essay deals with Satan and Satanism” in Esoteric Islam; and another offers a scathing critique of Authority” and sexual misery in modern Puritanist Islam. The Anti-caliph” evokes a hot mix of Ibn Arabi’s tantric mysticism and the revolutionary teachings of the Assassins.” The title essay, Sacred Drift,” roves through the history and poetics of Sufi travel, from Ibn Khaldun to Rimbaud in Abyssinia to the Situationists. A Romantic” view of Islam is taken to radical extremes; the exotic may not be True,” but it’s certainly a relief from academic propaganda and the obscene banality of simulation.
"This is my brand of Islam: insurrectionary, elegant, dangerous, suffused with light – a search for poetic facts, a donation from and to the tradition of spiritual anarchy." —Hakim Bey
"Peter Lamborn Wilson, in his book Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam, offers an interesting window into the early evolution of Islamic ideas among African Americans." —Abbas Milani, New Republic
Peter Lamborn Wilson lives in New York and works for Semiotext(e) magazine, Pacifica Radio, and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. A long decade in the Orient (1968-1981) inspires his writing, including The Drunken Universe: An Anthology of Persian Sufi Poetry and Scandal: Essays in Islamic Heresy. He also investigates Celtic psychoactive plants in his book Ploughing the Clouds which is also published by City Lights Publishers.

Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam

History

World

City Lights Publishers

The Rig Veda, written in India about 1500BC, praises a holy plant called Soma, which is sacrificed and consumed, granting the drinker an experience of enlightenment and ecstasy. The late Gordon Wasson identified Soma as a "magic mushroom," Amanita muscaria, and he and his followers discovered that such Indo-Europeans as the ancient Greeks, Iranians and Norse had also used a Soma-type plant.
In Ploughing the Clouds Peter Lamborn Wilson investigates the probability of a Soma cult in ancient Ireland, tracing clues in Irish (and other Celtic) lore. By comparing Celtic folktales, romances, epics and topographic lore with the Rig Veda, he uncovers the Irish branch of the great Indo-European tradition of psychedelic (or "entheogenic") shamanism, and even reconstructs some of its secret rituals. He uses this comparative material to illuminate the deep meaning of the Soma-function in all cultures: the entheogenic origin of "poetic frenzy," the link between intoxication and inspiration.

Ploughing the Clouds: The Search for Irish Soma

Lovers of Rumi and Hafez will find this volume an excellent means to deepening their understanding of Sufism and Sufi poetry.  Stages of spiritual unfoldment are viewed through the works of 33 poets.

Drunken Universe: An Anthology of Persian Sufi Poetry

Poetry

Phanes Press

Lovers of Rumi and Hafez will find this volume an excellent means to deepening their understanding of Sufism and Sufi poetry. Stages of spiritual unfoldment are viewed through the works of 33 poets.

The Drunken Universe: An Anthology of Persian Sufi Poetry (English and Persian Edition)

Scandal: Essays in Islamic Heresy

A search for the “poetic facts” of heresy in Islamic history, ranging from “sacred pederasty” in Persian sufism and forbidden imagery in Islamic art to the inner teachings of the Assassins, the heretical influences on Shiite terrorism, and the mystical uses of wine, opium, and hashish.

Religion & Spirituality

Autonomedia

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Wilson, Peter Lamborn. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Wilson, Peter Lamborn

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Wilson, Peter Lamborn. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Angels

Angels

Angels: Messengers of the Gods (Art and Imagination)

Angels (Art + Imagination)

Utopian Trace

Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam

Ploughing the Clouds: The Search for Irish Soma

Drunken Universe: An Anthology of Persian Sufi Poetry

The Drunken Universe: An Anthology of Persian Sufi Poetry (English and Persian Edition)

Scandal: Essays in Islamic Heresy